the return of the arab revolution

8/7/2019 The return of the Arab revolution

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The return of the Arab revolutionIssue: 130

http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?s=contents&issue=130

Posted: 1 April 11

Alex Callinicos

In the winter of 1939-40 the German Marxist critic Walter Benjamin wrote a remarkable text knownas Theses on the Philosophy of History. In it he attacked the widespread belief on the left thatsocialism would come about inevitably, as the fruit of historical progress. Nothing has corruptedthe German working class so much as the notion it was moving with the current, he wrote.Revolution is not the appointed result of humankinds progression through a homogeneous emptytime. Rather, it is a tigers leap into the past, which mobilises the memories of past sufferingand oppression against the ruling class. And Benjamin concluded by evoking the fact that, in the

Jewish Messianic tradition, every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah

might enter.1

Revolution, in other words, is not a predictable outcome of a forward historical movementit is asudden, unexpected irruption into a history that is a single catastrophe which keeps pilingwreckage upon wreckage.2 Benjamin wrote these words at a very dark historical moment,midnight in the century, when the Hitler-Stalin pact seemed to symbolise the death of all radicalhope. But they fit the revolutions that have swept through the Arab world since mid-December likea glove. Exploding apparently out of nowhere, quite unanticipated, an explosion of resentmentsdeeply compacted over decades, they are not simply rewriting the political map of the Middle East,but have a much broader historical meaning.

In the first instance, the upheavals in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya and their reverberations elsewherein the region mark the unforeseen return of the Arab revolution. Starting with the seizure of powerin Egypt by the Free Officers Movement in July 1952, the Arab revolution gripped a Middle East still

dominated by British and French imperialism. After he had emerged triumphant in the internalEgyptian struggle, Gamal Abdel Nasser didnt simply successfully confront the colonial powers andseize most of the assets of the Egyptian propertied classes. He appealed to the widespreadconsciousness throughout the region of belonging to a single Arab nation transcending the politicalboundaries dividing the various states emerging from the colonial era. In 1958 Nasser proclaimeda United Arab Republic involving a short-lived union between Egypt and Syria. He waged aprolonged proxy war with Saudi Arabia, then as now the citadel of Arab reaction, in North Yemen,and his followers played an active part in the great Iraqi Revolution of 1958-63. The pan-ArabNasserite Movement of Arab Nationalists was a training ground for the more radical leaders of thePalestinian resistance.

Already in retreat, Nasserite pan-Arabism experienced a decisive defeat when Israel triumphedover Egypt and the other Arab states in the Six Day War of June 1967. Nasser died a broken manthree years later. Arab national consciousness survived in the increasingly degenerate forms of the

Baathist dictatorships in Iraq and Syria and, much more positively, in the solidarity shown to thePalestinian struggle. But its persisting strength has been shown in the speed with which therevolutionary virus spread from Tunis after the fall of Zine El Abdine Ben Ali on 14 January to Egypt,

Yemen, Bahrain and Libya. Indeed, the ripple effects have been felt in Iran, itself an increasinglyinfluential force in the Arab world, stimulating a revival of the Green Movement. It was to preventthe spread of this revolutionary virus that the autocracies of the Gulf Cooperation Council senttroops into Bahrain in mid-March.

But no historical repetition is ever simple. Nassers pan-Arabism sought to unite the Arab worldagainst both Western imperialism and the Arab private bourgeoisie and landowners. It cameagainst the background of massive popular mobilisations in both Egypt and Iraq in the late 1940s
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and early 1950s that threw Britains client regimes in these countries into what proved to beterminal crises. But it was also a project relentlessly pursued from above, in which the FreeOfficers, and increasingly Nasser personally, sought to maintain control, manipulating, dividingand brutally repressing popular forces such as the Muslim Brotherhood and the EgyptianCommunist movement.3 In contrast, the Arab revolutions of 2011 have been driven by popularrebellions from below. As commentators have repeated to the point of clich, they have not beenthe property of any political party or movement, and have been driven by democratic aspirationsgiven body in the forms of self-organisation that have rapidly emerged in all these struggles.

What we are seeing is a renewal of the classical political form of revolution. Innumerable socialtheorists and media figures have over the past 20 years proclaimed revolution dead, whetherbecause of the definitive triumph of liberal capitalism in 1989 or thanks to the onset ofpostmodernity. At one stage it seemed it would survive only in the debased form of the colourrevolutions through which one gang of oligarchs would depose another under the banner ofdemocracy and with Washingtons strong material and moral support.

Yet, despite all the chatter about the role played by Facebook and Twitter in the Arab upheavals(debunked by Jonny Jones elsewhere in this issue), what is striking is how much the revolutions in

Tunisia and Egypt conform to a pattern first set during the English Revolution of the 1640s and theGreat French Revolution of the 1790spopular mobilisations, elite divisions at the top, battles forthe loyalties of the armed forces, struggles to define the political and economic character of thesuccessor regimes, and further, potentially more radical movements from below. In Libya at thetime of writing we see an even more elemental drive by Muammar Gaddafi and the revolutionariesconfronting him each to amass enough fighters and firepower to inflict a decisive victory on theother, initiating a civil war whose outcome remains uncertain and that has now been used to

justify the latest imperialist intervention in the Islamic world. Revolution is a 21st century reality.

The economic crisis claims political victimsOf course, it is much too simple to say that the Arab revolutions came out of the blue. To take themost important case, Egypt, a collective study by a group of scholars from the radical left(including several contributors to this journal) published less than two years ago plotted theeconomic, social and political contradictions, and the rising movements of resistance pushing theregime of Hosni Mubarak towards the moment of change.4 Marx himself insisted that it is

always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditionsof production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal,political, religious, artistic or philosophicin short, ideological forms in which men becomeconscious of this conflict and fight it out.5 It is one thing to identify the structural contradictionsdestabilising a given society, quite another to predict when and how these will fuse to detonate apolitical explosion.

But we are dealing here with a transnational wave of revolutions and therefore the detonatingcontradictions cant simply be located at the national level. Indeed, the best place to start is surelythe global economic and political crisis. About a year ago Susan Watkins, the editor ofNew LeftReview, wrote: Perhaps the most striking feature of the 2008 crisis so far has been itscombination of economic turmoil and political stasis.6So far now seems the operative part ofthis sentence. As we pointed out in response, severe structural crises such as the present one

have to be seen as protracted phenomena, passing through a succession of different phases.7

A similar view has recently been expressed by two Marxist economists whose explanation of thecrisis is different from that developed in this journal, Grard Dumnil and Dominique Lvy:

A common feature of structural crises is their multiple facets and their duration. It is,for example, difficult to tell exactly how long was the Great Depression or how long itwould have lasted had not preparation for the war boosted the economy. The macro-economy collapsed into the Depression itself from late 1929 to 1933. A gradualrecovery occurred to 1937, when output plunged anew. The war economy, then,thoroughly changed the course of events Most likely the same will be true of the
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contemporary crisis. Once positive growth rates prevail in the wake of the contractionof output, this will mark the entrance of a new phase, but certainly not the resolution ofthe tensions that led to the crisis. A lot will remain to be done. Will positive growthrates be decent growth rates? When will the disequilibria of the US economy be solved?How will the government debt be paid? Will the dollar support international pressures?

The establishment of a new, sustainable course of events will be a long and painstakingprocess.8

As we argued, a prolonged economic crisis will put pressure on bourgeois political structures,exposing their fault lines.9 This is precisely what has happened with the Arab revolutions. Thefault lines are at once economic and political. Egypt under Mubarak and Tunisia under Ben Ali wereboth poster boys for neoliberalism in the region. The World Bank, in its September 2010 countrybrief on Tunisia, couldnt contain its enthusiasm:

Tunisia has made remarkable progress on equitable growth, fighting poverty andachieving good social indicators. It has sustained an average 5 percent growth rateover the past 20 years with a steady increase in per capita income and a correspondingincrease in the welfare of its population that is underscored by a poverty level of 7percent that is amongst the lowest in the region.10

While more measured in its praise of the Mubarak regime, the bank still acknowledged its solidtrack record as one of the champions of economic reforms in the Middle East and North Africaregion.11 In fact, Egypt can claim to have pioneered neoliberalism in the Global South. In 1974President Anwar Sadat announced the policy ofinfitah, economic opening to foreign investmentand trade, that marked a radical break with Nassers drive to state capitalism.12 Mubarak took thispolicy further, agreeing on an Economic Reform and Structural Adjustment Programme with theinternational financial institutions in 1991. One of its key planks was Law 96 of 1991, whichrepealed the rights given to tenants under the Free Officers 1952 agrarian reform allowing the oldlandlords and their heirs to return and dispossess peasant households.13

Despite talk by the Mubarak regime during the 1990s of a Tiger on the Nile, the Egyptian andTunisian economies experienced no miracle under neoliberalism, remaining heavily dependentfor foreign exchange on textile production vulnerable to Chinese competition and on tourism.Despite some growth, liberalisation brought very sharp economic and social polarisation that putpressure on the corporatist structures that had been built up under Nasser and his Tunisiancounterpart, Habib Bourguiba. Anne Alexander observes that in Egypt under Nasser:

workers were offered a social contract where in return for renouncing their politicalindependence they could expect some gains, such as subsidised housing, education,other welfare benefits and relative job security. Nasserist rhetoric, particularly in its latephase, idealised workers for their contribution to national development. But theNasserist state crushed independent workers organisations and in their place built anofficial trade union federation which was subservient to the government.14

But, Alexander continues, the reforms of the 1990s and beyond fractured the Nasserist system.On the one hand, poverty, inequality and unemployment have grown in Egypt. In 2010 theInternational Labour Organisation claimed that 44 percent of Egyptians lived below theinternational poverty line of $2 a day.15 The previous year Ahmad El-Naggar estimated that thetotal number of unemployedamounts to 7.9 million and the true unemployment rate is now 26.3percent, and some estimate the rate in the 15 to 29 age group is over three times that figure.16

Rising unemployment, particularly among the young, is a regional problem. Even the World Banksown more detailed research contradicts the upbeat headlines. A report, poignantly dated 15

January 2011, the day after Ben Alis fall, acknowledged:

In the Middle East and North Africa, the youth unemployment rate at 25 percent is thehighest in the world. But that statistic alone doesnt tell the whole story.
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World Bank researchers are finding that the actual number of jobless people betweenthe ages of 15 and 29 in the region could be much higher. Many young people who areout of school and out of work are not reflected in the statistics because they are notlooking for work.

Young urban males, in particular, are at a serious disadvantage in the labour market,with many underemployed, employed in off-the-books informal work, or not working at

all.17

On the other hand, a tiny layer of super-rich have amassed vast wealth and power. Joel Beininwrites that in Egypt the holders of the economic portfolios in the government of Ahmed Nazif,appointed prime minister in July 2004, were Western-educated PhDs in the entourage of GamalMubarak, son of the president. They promoted a second wave of privatisation and enacted othermeasures to encourage foreign direct investment, such as reducing to zero the tariffs on textilemachinery and spare parts.18 The 25 January Revolution forced even the New York Times toacknowledge the real nature of this liberalisation:

On paper, the changes transformed an almost entirely state-controlled economicsystem to a predominantly free-market one. In practice, though, a form of cronycapitalism emerged, according to Egyptian and foreign experts. State-controlled banksacted as kingmakers, extending loans to families who supported the government butdenying credit to viable business people who lacked the right political pedigree.

Ahmed El-Naggar, director of the economic studies unit at Al-Ahram Centre for Politicaland Strategic Studies, said government officials sold state-owned land to politicallyconnected families for low prices. They also allowed foreign conglomerates to buystate-owned companies for small amounts. In exchange, he said, they receivedkickbacks.

At the same time, the government required foreign investors to form joint ventures withEgyptian firms. Families with close ties to the governing party formed the Egyptian halfof the lucrative joint ventures.19

The symbol of Egyptian crony capitalism was Ahmed Ezz who, thanks to his friendship with GamalMubarak in particular, was able to buy a privatised steel firm cheaply and end up controlling twothirds of the Egyptian steel market. He also became a member of parliament and ran the thuggishcampaign of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) in the flagrantly rigged legislativeelections of November 2010. The Tunisian equivalent was provided by the Trabelsis, Ben Alis in-laws, who used their family connections to enrich themselves. According to TransparencyInternational, between them the Ben Alis and Trabelsis controlled 30 to 40 percent of the Tunisianeconomy, around $10 billion. Leila Trabelsi, the ex-presidents wife, is accused of fleeing to Jeddahwith 1.5 tonnes of gold bars in her luggage.20

Thus neoliberalism in the Middle East meant, not the separation of economic and political powerimplied in the abstract idea of the free market, but its fusion. This was no longer state capitalism:now political connections allowed those at the top to amass vast private wealth. The effect was to

direct economic and social grievances to the pinnacle of the regimes, where the corruptinterpenetration of elites was so flagrantly on display.

The global economic crisis then tightened the screws. Juan Kornblihtt and Bruno Magro write:

The structural weakness appeared in all its magnitude with the 2008 crisis. The springswhich had enabled the small boom collapsed as a whole. If we focus on Egypt, we seethat remittances from emigrants fell by 17 percent compared to 2008, tourism alsowent from a rise of 24 percent in 2008 to a fall of 1.1 percent in 2009 and the SuezCanal revenues fell by 7.2 percent compared to 2008, because the travel passages fellby 8.2 percent and tonnage of goods transported decreased by 9 percent. The situationin Tunisia was not very different: its growth of GDP decelerates from rising at 6.33
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percent in 2007 to 4.5 percent and 3.1 percent in 2008 and 2009 respectively, whileexports of goods fell by 25 percent, largely due to the decline in textiles and appareland petroleum-related products.21

The crisis made itself felt in the Middle East through higher unemployment, especially among theyoung. But a particularly important role has been played by surges in food prices. In the lead up tothe 2008 financial crash there was a sharp rise in the rate of inflation, particularly for basic

commodities. Hermann Schwartz argues that this marked a turning point in the development ofthe crisis, when China ceased to exert downward pressure on world prices by supplying a flood ofever cheaper manufactured goods. The Chinese export successes also implied rapid Chinesegrowth and, thus, increasing Chinese calls on global raw materials and in its [sic] own supplies ofsemi-skilled labour. Raw material prices started rising in 2004 and Chinese wages started rising in2007. China, thus, started exporting inflation rather than deflation.22

The recovery from the Great Recession of 2008-9 is being accompanied by a similar rise in the rateof inflation. As Schwartz argues, increases in demand, particularly in China and the rapidly growingemerging market economies of Asia and Latin America, have played a role in these inflationaryepisodes, but these are massively amplified by financial speculation. Higher food prices hit theworlds poor hard. According to Michel Chossudovsky:

from 2006 to 2008, there was a dramatic surge in the prices of all major food staples

including rice, wheat and corn. The price of rice tripled over a five year period, fromapproximately $600 a ton in 2003 to more than $1800 a ton in May 2008 The recentsurge in the price of grain staples is characterised by a 32 percent jump in the FAO[United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation]s composite food price indexrecorded in the second half of 2010. 23

The scarcity and cost of bread were, for example, an important factor in the strike wave that sweptEgypt from 2006 onwards, preparing the way for the 25 January Revolution. The cost of living,along with the privileges of the elite, has been endlessly cited by street protesters across theMiddle East. The potentially explosive situation that developed in the region is dramatically evokedby Larbi Sadiki, writing as the Tunisian rising, sparked by the suicide of Mohamed Boazizi, broughtdown Ben Ali:

It is not the Quran or Sayyid Qutb[the Muslim Brotherhood leader] who is in absentiacharged with perpetrating 9/11 despite being dead since 1966Western securityexperts should worry about. They should perhaps purchase Das Kapital and bond withKarl Marx to get a reality check, a rethink, a dose of sobriety in a post-9/11 worldafflicted by over-securitisation.

From Tunisia and Algeria in the Maghreb to Jordan and Egypt in the Arab east, the realterror that eats at self-worth, sabotages community and communal rites of passage,including marriage, is the terror of socio-economic marginalisation.

The armies of khobzistes (the unemployed of the Maghreb)now marching for breadin the streets and slums of Algiers and Kasserine and who tomorrow may be in Amman,Rabat, Sanaa, Ramallah, Cairo and southern Beirutare not fighting the terror of

unemployment with ideology. They do not need one. Unemployment is their ideology.The periphery is their geography. And for now, spontaneous peaceful protest and self-harm is their weaponry. They are les misrables of the modern world.24

But its important to stress that, though the economic mechanisms and the political context aredifferent, the Middle East isnt the only region where the crisis is generating significant struggles.

The spread of austerity across Europe provoked serious resistance in 2010, from the generalstrikes in Greece to the student explosion in Britain. The near-demolition of Fianna Fil, thehistorical party of southern Irish capitalism, in the general election of February 2011, leaving SinnFin and the United Left Alliance as the main opposition to the new Fine Gael-Labour coalition
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government, is another sign that the situation isnt exactly one of political stasis.

But one of the remarkable political developments so far this year has been the explosiveemergence of a mass movement in Wisconsin seeking to block Governor Scott Walkers drive toslash public sector jobs and scrap collective bargaining rights for state workers. This is a directconsequence of the sweeping successes the Tea Party movement helped to secure the Republicansin last autumns mid-term elections. Now right wingers like Walker are installed in state capitolsand in the Congress in Washingtonand are seeking to realise the Tea Partys dream massively to

shrink Big Government. As Megan Trudell suggested might happen in our last issue, the effecthas been to provoke massive social and political polarisation, not just in Wisconsin, but in othermid-Western states where similar assaults are being mounted on the public sector and organisedlabour.25

The contrast between the giant demonstrations blockading the state capitol in Madison, Wisconsinand the relative small mobilisations that the Tea Party has been able to mount in response indicatethe problems that the austerity offensiveinitiated by the Republicans but also embraced in moremoderate terms by Barack Obamamay face. A Gallup opinion poll showed that 61 percent ofAmericans opposed the Walker plan, with those earning less than $24,000 a year 74 percentagainst, those on $24,000 to $59,000 63 percent against, those on $60,000 to $89,000 53 percentagainst, and only those on $90,000 and upwards 50 percent in favour. A Washington Postbloggercommented that these figures suggest that the Republican strategy of targeting public sectorworkers as the new welfare queens may be backfiring:

I think its fair to speculate that the focus of Walkers proposal on rolling back long-accepted bargaining rights, and the massive amount of media attention to it, may havereframed the debate and refocused the publics attention in a way that is underminingthe rights previous advantage on questions involving public employees. This isnt tosay the right doesnt still have the upper hand in some ways. And Walker very well maywin in the end. But the landscape has clearly changed in an unexpected way.26

Now the emerging anti-austerity movement in the United States isnt the same as the Arab risings.Not only is the margin of material survival much greater, but there exist mediating structuresinparticular, the Democratic Party and the trade union bureaucracywhose absence in the Arabworld greatly restricts the ruling classes room for manoeuvre in the face of the mass risings.Nevertheless, despite the differences in local political and social geologies, the shockwaves of the

crisis are making themselves felt globally.27

A crisis for the WestThere have been moments in history where revolution spread in a region or around theworld as if it were a wildfire. These moments do not come often. Those that come tomind include 1848, where a rising in France engulfed Europe. There was also 1968,where the demonstrations of what we might call the New Left swept the world: MexicoCity, Paris, New York and hundreds of other towns saw anti-war revolutions staged byMarxists and other radicals. Prague saw the Soviets smash a New Leftist government.Even Chinas Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution could, by a stretch, be included. In1989, a wave of unrest, triggered by East Germans wanting to get to the West,

generated an uprising in Eastern Europe that overthrew Soviet rule similar social andcultural conditions generate similar events and are triggered by the example of onecountry and then spread more broadly. That has happened in 2011 and is continuing.28

These are the words of no Marxist, but of George Friedman, founder of the American strategicintelligence website Stratfor. The scale of the revolutions and rebellions in the Arab world justifiesthese historical comparisons. But there is an immediate difference that sets 2011 apart from itsmost immediate predecessor, 1989. The revolutions that swept away the Stalinist regimes inEastern and Central Europe strengthened Western capitalism in general and US imperialism inparticular. By contrast, the Arab revolutionsand above all the upheaval in Egyptare a dagger


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directed at the heart of American imperialism.

The reason is well explained by Friedman:

When Egypt was a pro-Soviet Nasserite state, the world was a very different place thanit had been before Nasser. When Sadat changed his foreign policy the world changedwith it. If the Sadat foreign policy changes, the world changes again. Egypt is one ofthose countries whose internal politics matter to more than its own citizens.29

Egypt is the largest country in the Arab world, Cairo its cultural capital. Egypts pivotalgeographical position, at the junction of the Maghreb, the Mashreq (Arab East), the Gulf, and sub-Saharan Africa, means that when it changes, the ripple-effects are felt over a very wide area.Nassers revolution from above and his confrontation with Western imperialism not only launchedthe wave of pan-Arab nationalism, but helped to conjure into existence the Third World as apolitical entitypost-colonial states that (pace Friedman) refused to align themselves firmly witheither the US or the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

Similarly, when Sadat moved Egypt rightwards in the early 1970s, the impact was felt on a verywide scale. This shift wasnt just economicinfitah. At least as important was the geopoliticalrevolution consecrated by the Peace Treaty Sadat signed with Israel in March 1979, which led toIsraeli withdrawal from Sinai. In the preceding 30 years Egypt had fought four wars with Israel, themost recent of which, in October 1973, had caught Israel on the hop. Peace with Egypt protected

Israels southern flank. As Noam Chomsky puts it, crucially, Egyptian military forces wereexcluded from the Arab-Israeli conflict, so that Israel could concentrate its attention (and itsmilitary forces) on the occupied territories and the northern border: a generation of peace in Sinaiallowed the Israel Defence Force to wage war on Lebanon and Gaza.30

Egypt under Sadat and Mubarak became, along with Israel and Saudi Arabia, the basis of thesystem of alliances through which the US has maintained its hegemony over the Middle East. TheMubarak regime proved its value to Washington in many ways: helping to orchestrate the allianceagainst Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Gulf War; intelligence cooperation against the Islamists(Wikileaks cables reveal how highly the US embassy in Cairo valued Omar Suleiman, Mubaraksintelligence chief and short-lived vice-president); renditions for torture in Egypts prisons(Suleiman seems to have played a literally hands-on role here);31 and maintaining the blockade onGaza. In exchange, the Egyptian armed forces that remained the basis of the regime received their

annual strategic rent of $1.3 billion in US military aid.But the links between the West and the Arab dictatorships are much more extensive than the US-Egyptian axis, fundamental though it is. They have been exposed by the rich crop of scandals therevolutions are producing. The most prominent victim so far is Michle Alliot-Marie, sacked asFrench foreign minister after her intimate relationship with the Ben Ali regime came to light.LeMonde commented (maybe rather too generously to Alliot-Marie, who had been involved in

Tunisian property deals via her elderly parents):

Viewed from Tunisia, the troubles of Michle Alliot-Marie seem almost secondary. Duringthe Ben Ali era, Franco-Tunisian acquaintances were, in fact, so frequent, so familiarthat they became part of Tunisians everyday landscape. There was, these last twentyyears, a French tradition of supporting the dictator, says Ridha Kfi, editor of theonline journal Kapitalis based in the Tunisian capital. If MAM has been caught out, it is

because she, like plenty of others, gave way to the atmosphere of tranquil connivancethat had been established between Paris and Tunis.32

Britain and the US, by contrast, were deeply involved in intense efforts to court a much lesspromising candidate for neoliberal restructuring, Libya, once Gaddafi had come to terms with themin 2003. These included the debauchment of the reputation of the London School of Economicsand of the name of Ralph Miliband through the relationship developed particularly by LSEs Centrefor Global Governance with Seif al-Islam Gaddafi.33 Ex-LSE director and ideologue of the ThirdWay Anthony Giddens mused after a Libyan jaunt in 2007: Will real progress be possible onlywhen Gaddafi leaves the scene? I tend to think the opposite My ideal future for Libya in two or
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three decades time would be a Norway of North Africa: prosperous, egalitarian and forward-looking.34

But the drive to integrate the Gaddafi regime in the world economy went much further. The sameyear, Business Weekreported that Michael Porter, Harvard Business School guru and author ofTheCompetitive Advantage of Nations, was part of a project organised by the Boston consultancyMonitor Group to create a new pro-business elite in Libya. 35 Among the other Americanintellectual grandees mobilised by Monitor Group to make the pilgrimage to Tripoli and exchange

banalities with the Gaddafis were Francis Fukuyama, Richard Perle, Robert Putnam, Joseph Nye andBenjamin Barber.36

The very depth of Western engagement even with the Arab dictatorship with the longest history ofpast confrontation with the US and his allies may help to explain the vehemence with whichBarack Obama and David Cameron denounced Gaddafi once the revolt against him beganandalso perhaps the speed with which Cameron was willing to run up the flag of liberalinterventionism that had been so discredited by association with George W Bushs and TonyBlairs military adventure in Iraq. By helping to deliver the coup de grace to Gaddafi, the Westernpowers might gain some leverage in an important oil producer, but also belatedly win some creditfor supporting the struggle for democracy in the Arab world.

It is remarkable how the rhetoric of humanitarian intervention and responsibility to protect isbeing pumped up, as if the disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan had never happened. The Western

powers record of closely allying themselves to the Arab dictatorships should make it amply clearthat their intervention in Libya is not to support the revolution, but to rebuild their domination ofthe Middle East and North Africa.

But they have a big hill to climb in trying to rebuild their credibility in the Arab world. The PewGlobal Attitudes Projects 2010 survey of attitudes to the US found Egypt at the bottom of thetable, with only 17 percent having a favourable attitude towards America, down from 30 percent in2006, when Egypt was first polled (interestingly, both Turkey and Pakistan also recorded the same17 percent low).37 Even though both the Egyptian military and the Muslim Brotherhood havepromised that the Peace Treaty with Israel remains sacrosanct, any future Egyptian governmentthat isto place the bar as low as possiblemore responsive to public opinion than Mubaraks waswill be less compliant with American wishes.

Bruised by the Iraq debacle and the economic crisis, and preoccupied with Chinas rapid rise, USpolicy-makers show a rueful awareness of the limits of their power. A fortnight after Mubaraks fallRobert Gates, the outgoing defence secretary, chose West Point, where in June 2002 George WBush first outlined his Doctrine affirming Americas right of pre-emptive attack, to declare: Inmy opinion, any future defence secretary who advises the president to again send a big Americanland army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined, as GeneralMacArthur so delicately put it.38

Gates also was quick to pour cold water on Camerons ill-briefed talk of imposing a no-fly zoneover Libya. Though the Obama administration eventually backed the UN Security Councilresolution authorising the use of air power against Gaddafi, it is clear that the US has no greatstomach for military intervention in Libya. Obamas shift may have been intended to compensatefor its acquiescence in the bloody clampdowns on protesters in Bahrain and Yemen. The Saudi-initiated intervention in Bahrain represents the collective rejection by the Gulf sheikhdoms of the

policy adopted by a weakened US of welcoming the democracy movements and using them tohelp push through neoliberal reforms. The Financial Times commented on Gatess speech:

The US is a different country today after ten years of war, struggling with recorddeficits and suffering from intervention fatigue, in the words of Richard Haass,president of the Council on Foreign Relations think-tank.

In such a context, Mr Gatess statement about the madness of dispatching US groundtroops overseas simply seems like common sense. It is a very rare admission ofsomething that is all too true but very rarely articulated by someone of that stature,said Aaron David Miller, a former state department official.39
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US caution contrasts with panic in Israel, whose strategic position is potentially very seriouslycompromised by the 25 January Revolution. After Mubaraks fall the head of an Israeli think tankadmitted: Our whole structure of analysis just collapsed.40 Ari Shavit, a columnist in thesupposedly liberal daily Haaretz, was positively incandescent with rageat Washington:

The Wests position reflects the adoption of Jimmy Carters worldview: kowtowing tobenighted, strong tyrants while abandoning moderate, weak ones Carters betrayal ofthe Shah [during the Iranian Revolution of 1978-9] brought us the ayatollahs, and will

soon bring us ayatollahs with nuclear arms. The consequences of the Wests betrayal ofMubarak will be no less severe. Its not only a betrayal of a leader who was loyal to theWest, served stability and encouraged moderation. Its a betrayal of every ally of theWest in the Middle East and the developing world. The message is sharp and clear: TheWests word is no word at all; an alliance with the West is not an alliance. The West haslost it. The West has stopped being a leading and stabilising force around the world.

The Arab liberation revolution will fundamentally change the Middle East. Theacceleration of the Wests decline will change the world. One outcome will be a surgetowards China, Russia and regional powers like Brazil, Turkey and Iran. Another will be aseries of international flare-ups stemming from the Wests lost deterrence. But theoverall outcome will be the collapse of North Atlantic political hegemony not indecades, but in years. When the United States and Europe bury Mubarak now, they are

also burying the powers they once were. In Cairos Tahrir Square, the age of Westernhegemony is fading away. 41

In the rapids of revolutionThe very shrillness of Shavits denunciation betrays the fear of a client state that one day it toomay be betrayed by the imperial power. Tariq Ali expresses a much more measured judgement:American hegemony in the region has been dented but not destroyed. The post-despot regimesare likely to be more independent, with a democratic system that is fresh and subversive and,hopefully, new constitutions enshrining social and political needs. But the military in Egypt and

Tunisia will ensure nothing rash happens.42

Assessing this judgement requires us to pay closer attention to the revolutions themselves. Inwhat sense can these upheavals be described as revolutions at all? Trotsky in the preface to hisgreat History of the Russian Revolution famously writes: The history of a revolution is for us firstof all a history of the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership over their owndestiny.43 By this criterion, the events in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya all thoroughly qualify asrevolutions. All were driven by mass initiatives from below: in Egypt above all the magnificent self-organisation in Tahrir Square was on display to the world.

To say that these revolutions have been based on the self-organisationof the masses isnt the same as describing them as purely spontaneous, as Chamseddine Mnasridoes in his article on Tunisia elsewhere in this issue. Predictably enough, the strongest version ofthe latter claim has been made by Michael Hardt and Toni Negri:

Even calling these struggles revolutions seems to mislead commentators whoassume the progression of events must obey the logic of 1789 or 1917, or some otherpast European rebellion against kings and tsars The organisation of the revoltsresembles what we have seen for more than a decade in other parts of the world, fromSeattle to Buenos Aires and Genoa and Cochabamba, Bolivia: a horizontal network thathas no single, central leader. Traditional opposition bodies can participate in thisnetwork but cannot direct itthe multitude is able to organise itself without a centrethat the imposition of a leader or being co-opted by a traditional organisation wouldundermine its power.44

Although Hardt and Negri are eager to proclaim the novelty of what they therefore refuse to
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describe as revolutions, a remark that Antonio Gramsci made in 1930 fully applies to theirargument: it must be stressed that pure spontaneity does not exist in history In the mostspontaneous movement it is simply the case that the elements of conscious leadership cannotbe checked, have left no reliable document.45 In fact, it is quite possible to demonstrate theelements of conscious leadership present in the Arab revolutions. Thus in Tunisia, even thoughthe leadership of the Union Gnrale Tunisienne du Travail (UGTT) were locked into the Ben Aliregime, affiliated and regional unions had become increasingly restive during the 2000s, took partin the developing uprising as it spread across the country, and forced the executive to call ageneral strike on 14 January. 46

The Egyptian 25 January Revolution was prepared for by a decade of movementsin solidaritywith the second Palestinian intifada, against the Iraq War, for democracy in Egypt itself, andculminating in a strike wave described by Beinin as the largest social movement Egypt haswitnessed in over half a century. Over 1.2 million workers and their families have engaged in someform of action.47 The initial day of rage on 25 January was organised by activists who had beeninvolved in these different movementshuman rights campaigners, liberals, left Nasserites andrevolutionary socialists. Once the confrontation developed in Tahrir Square, they were joined byyouth cadres of the Muslim Brotherhood, even though the official leadership still held back.

Of course, the fact that the 25 January Revolution was initiated and organised by very narrowcircles of activists doesnt explain why the demonstrations in late January unleashed a mass rising

when the numerous earlier protests called by the same milieu attracted a few hundred or, at best,thousands. The sheer accumulation of grievances and the example of Tunisia may help to explainthe difference, as may also the impact of the November 2010 elections, so flagrantly rigged thatthe opposition Islamists and Nasserites represented in the previous parliament withdrew from thesecond round in disgust. But the sheer unpredictability of revolution is nothing new: notoriously,the fall of the tsar in February 1917 took Lenin by surprise. The dynamics of the Egyptian upheavalreveal, not the lyrical insurgency of the centre-less multitude, but rather what Gramsci called adialectical process, in which the spontaneous movement of the revolutionary masses and theorganised and directing will of the centre converge.48

In the case of the initial Egyptian uprising, the centre was at once quite small and politicallyheterogeneous. The one respect in which Hardts and Negris theory of the multitude fits the Arabrevolutions is that the movements that have driven them were, to begin with at least, relativelyundifferentiated socially and politically. But once again this is a common feature of the early

stages of revolutions. So too was the limited content of the upheavalsthe removal of autocraticrulers and of the regimes over which they presided.

Trotsky wrote: History has knownnot only social revolutions, which substituted the bourgeois forthe feudal regime, but also political revolutions which, without destroying the economicfoundations of society, swept out an old ruling upper crust (1830 and 1848 in France, February1917 in Russia, etc).49What we have seen so far in the Arab world are political, not socialrevolutions, and, moreover, ones that have so far succeeded in removing rulers rather than theirregimes. Hence George Friedmans initial debunking response to Mubaraks fall:

What happened was not a revolution. The demonstrators never brought down Mubarak,let alone the regime. What happened was a military coup that used the cover ofprotests to force Mubarak out of office in order to preserve the regime. When it becameclear on 10 February that Mubarak would not voluntarily step down, the military stagedwhat amounted to a coup to force his resignation. Once he was forced out of office, themilitary took over the existing regime by creating a military council and taking controlof critical ministries. The regime was always centred on the military. What happened on11 February was that the military took direct control.50

The kernel of truth in this statement is that, in Tunisia as well as Egypt, the army stepped in toremove the president and attempt to restore order. Moreover, Mubaraks fall came against thebackground of conflicts between him and the military over the presidential succession. InSeptember 2008 Margaret Scobey, US ambassador to Egypt, reported in a cable released byWikileaks:
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Contacts agree that presidential son Gamal Mubaraks power base is centred in thebusiness community, not with the military. XXXXXXXXXXXX said officers told himrecently that the military does not support Gamal and if Mubarak died in office, themilitary would seize power rather than allow Gamal to succeed his father. However,analysts agreed that the military would allow Gamal to take power through an electionif President Mubarak blessed the process and effectively gave Gamal the reigns [sic] ofpower. XXXXXXXXXXXX opined that after Gamal became active in the NDP in 2002, theregime empowered the reformers in the 2004 cabinet to begin privatisation efforts thatbuttressed the wealthy businessmen close to Gamal. In his estimation, the regimesgoal is to create a business-centred power base for Gamal in the NDP to compensatefor his lack of military credentials. A necessary corollary to this strategy, he claimed,was for the regime to weaken the militarys economic and political power so that itcannot block Gamals path to the presidency.51

Gilbert Achcar has pointed out that the power of the military as an institution gave the Egyptianand Tunisian ruling classes and the Western imperialist powers room for manoeuvre lacking inLibya. In the latter case, Gaddafis systematic policy of hollowing out the state apparatuses and hishighly personalised family autocracy have meant that his removal proved to require armedinsurrection and the destruction of the existing state.52The Arab dictatorships embrace in fact aspectrum of political forms, ranging from quite complex and institutionalised regimes such as

Egypt, which in recent years has offered some space for legitimate opposition, to much morepersonalised autocratic forms of rule, often combining a reigning family with a sectarian socialbase: the latter is to be found in Saudi Arabia, where a monarchy transferred between the ageingsons of Ibn Saud is legitimised by the Wahhabi version of Sunni Islam, and republican Syria,where the presidency was successfully passed from father to son, and is sustained by the minoritybelonging to the Alawi sect of Shia Islam.

As Libya shows, the family autocracies are likely to be particularly tough nuts to crack. The Saudiinterior minister, Prince Nayef, told reformers in 2003: What we won by the sword, we keep bythe sword.53 King Abdullah was sufficiently worried by the popular movements in neighbouringBahrain and Yemen and the stirrings of dissent inside his own realm to announce on returning fromconvalescence on 23 February $36 billion of social investment.54 But on 14 March the SaudiNational Guard moved into Bahrain, after protesters had overwhelmed the local riot police.

The differences in state form are important, as are the divisions within individual regimes, inconditioning the possibilities for change in different countries. But they do not alter the fact thatthe decisive factor in the Arab revolutions has been, to repeat Trotskys words, the forcibleentrance of the masses into the realm of rulership over their own destiny. Trotsky adds:

The masses go into a revolution not with a prepared plan of social reconstruction, butwith a sharp feeling that they cannot endure the old regime The fundamental politicalprocess of the revolution thus consists in the gradual comprehension by a class of theproblems arising from the social crisisthe active orientation of the masses by amethod of successive approximations.55

Trotsky here highlights a key feature of revolutions: that while they revolve around decisiveepisodes where control over state power is settled, they areprocesses that unfold in time. The

Russian Revolution of 1917, which took eight months from February to October, was in factrelatively brief. The Great French Revolution lasted just over five years, from the storming of theBastille in July 1789 to the Thermidorean coup in July 1794, while the German Revolution tookalmost as long, from November 1918 to October 1923.56 The different phases of these processes,with their advances and retreats, victories and defeats for the forces of revolution and counter-revolution, and for left and right within the revolutionary camp, represent a learning process forthe masses. The successive approximations onto which they latch in pursuit of a solution to theirproblems can lead to the progressive radicalisation of the masses and a decisive transfer ofpolitical power that inaugurates a social revolution.

But there is nothing inevitable about this outcome. The closest equivalent to such a process in the
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Arab world, the Iraqi Revolution of 1958-63, started with the overthrow of the monarchy bynationalist army officers led by General Abd al-Karim Qasim, but, very differently from Egypt in1952, gave rise to a massive popular radicalisation that mainly benefited the Communist Party,which won considerable support within the army itself. But in May 1959 the party leadershipbacked away from making a bid for power, in part because of pressure from Moscow, whichregarded Qasim, like Nasser, as an ally in the Cold War. The resulting demobilisation andfragmentation gave the initiative to the Baath, which staged a coup with CIA support in February1963 that toppled Qasim and subjected the Communists themselves to bloody repression.57

There is a strong case for saying that Mubarak was removed by the US and the military to preventa deepening radicalisation taking place. A comparison with the other great revolutionary processin the modern Middle East, the Iranian Revolution of 1978-9, is il luminating. Confronted with arising wave of mass protests and strikes, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi clung to power, relying onincreasingly savage repression. The Shiite tradition of commemorating the dead 40 days aftertheir death meant, as Ryszard Kapuscinski puts it, that the Iranian revolution develops in arhythm of explosions succeeding each other at 40-day intervals. Every 40 days there is anexplosion of despair, anger, blood. Each time the explosion is more horrible, bigger and biggercrowds, more and more victims.58

On 8 September 1978 the shah declared martial law and his troops slaughtered thousands ofdemonstrators in Tehran. Mass strikes spread from the strategically crucial oil industry to othersectors. The cumulative effect of successive bloody mass confrontations on the streets was toerode the morale and cohesion of the army. This meant that, when the shah was finally bundledinto exile in January 1979 under US pressure, mutinies spread through the army, and the generalswere too weak to prevent a successful insurrection at the beginning of February, organised byradical left and Islamist guerrilla groups.59

This was the kind of scenario the Egyptian generals were keen to head off. During the weekstarting 6 February 2011 the multitude began to develop a sharper class profile: the Egyptianworkers movement, hitherto involved as individuals in the mass movement, but invisible as acollective, began decisively to move centre-stage, launching a strike wave that continues to thepresent. According to the Washington Post, by midweek, confronted with growing throngs inCairo, labour strikes and deteriorating economic conditions, top military and civilian leadersreached an apparent agreement with Mubarak on some form of power transfer. But he renegedon the deal in his television speech on 10 February, provoking a furious popular reaction. Obama

responded with a statement that, in effect, called for him to go. For the Washington Post:it was a crucial shift for a White House that had been the scene of sometimes heatedexchanges between aides who pressed for a strong message of support for democraticchange in Egypt and others who worried that doing so could disrupt the traditionalgovernment-to-government relationship with a key ally.

There was a discernible change in Cairo, as well. Within hours of Mubaraks speech,support for Mubarak from [the] military dropped precipitously, said a US governmentofficial who closely tracked the events.

The military had been willingwith the right tone in the speechto wait and see howit played out, the official said. They didnt like what they saw By the end of the day,

it was clear the situation was no longer tenable.

Mubarak was told Friday [11 February] that he must step down, and within hours, hewas on his way to the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.60

But the problem facing the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces that supplanted Mubarakandbehind it the Egyptian ruling class and the White Houseis that, in Egypt as in Tunisia, therevolution is driven by a combination of material and political grievances that cannot be assuagedby the purely cosmetic changes on offer from the successor governments, both initially headed byprime ministers appointed by the fleeing president.
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This logic became visible in Tunisia immediately after Ben Alis fall, with continuing protests drivenby the desire to get rid of the entire regime, most notably with the demand to purge thegovernment of all members of the old ruling party, the Rassemblement ConstitutionnelDmocratique (RCD). But what we have seen develop in both Egypt and Tunisia is a much broaderprocess of what Philip Marfleet elsewhere in this issue rightly calls saneamiento (cleansing), afterthe version that developed in Portugal after the Armed Forces Movement overthrew the right wingdictatorship in April 1974.

One of the first democratic impulses after the overthrow of an authoritarian regime is the drivesimultaneously to purge the state apparatus and hold it to public account. Frequently this targetsthe old regimes secret policethe DGS (Direcco Geral de Segurana) in Portugal, or the Stasi(Ministry of State Security) in East Germany after the 1989 Revolution. Exactly this process isunfolding today in the Arab revolutions. Thus in early March the headquarters of the State SecurityInvestigation Service (SSIS) in Nasr City, near Cairo, was stormed, along with many of its otheroffices, mainly to prevent the destruction of secret documents. In Tunisia protesterssimultaneously forced the interim government actually to dissolve State Security, while the RCDhas been suppressed by court order. In the copycat pattern that is a striking feature of the tworevolutions, as they gain encouragement from each other, the Egyptian interior minister orderedthe SSIS disbanded on 15 March.

The mass movement won other victories, once again more or less simultaneously, forcing out theprime ministers inherited from the old regime in both countries. In the abstract, therefore, the

thrust of these struggles has been political, seeking to push the process of democratisation muchfurther and faster than either the Egyptian military junta or the Tunisian interim government wouldlike. But the problem is that, because of the form that neoliberalism has taken in the Middle East, itis very hard to separate politics and economics. Tearing up the roots of the Mubarak and Ben Aliregimes will mean cutting deep into the political economy of Egyptian and Tunisian society. TheEgyptian army is directly vulnerable because, in a holdover from Nasserite state capitalism, itcontrols an economic empire estimated at several percentage points of Egypts national income.61

There are two possible scenarios ahead for both these countries. One is Portugal 1974-5wherethe revolution was initiated by a progressive military coup, but the drive for saneamiento after 50years of dictatorship promoted social and political polarisation and the radicalisation of bothworkers and rank and file soldiers. Portugal came closer in the 18 months after the Armed ForcesMovement seized power to socialist revolution than any other Western European country since the

1930s. The left was only defeated by a Europe-wide mobilisation of reaction fronted by socialdemocracy and orchestrated by the US. The other scenario is offered by Indonesia after 1998,where the overthrow of the Suharto dictatorship (another case of crony capitalism centred on theruling family) at the height of the Asian economic crisis opened a new space for mass mobilisationfrom below, but ultimately stability was restored with the introduction of a liberal-democraticpolitical faade.

Plainly the Western powers and the Egyptian and Tunisian ruling classes would prefer theIndonesian scenario to the Portuguese. But the fusion of economic and political power in neoliberalEgypt and Tunisia and the appalling material situation of very large sections of the population inboth countries make this very hard to pull off. The economic pressures on the mass of thepopulationunemployment, especially among the young, the rising price of food and other basiccommodities, to which must be added the disruptive effect of the revolts themselves on sectorssuch as tourismare a continually destabilising factor.

Moreover, in Egypt we see the workers movement gaining in strength and self-assertion,mounting strikes and occupations around a variety of economic and political demands. Followingthe initiative described by Marfleet elsewhere in this journal, a preparatory conference of theEgyptian Federation of Independent Unions met on 2 March.62 In addition to the strikes, a plethoraof protests have developed over social and economic issues ranging from rents to the price ofbutane gas. These economic struggles, coming as they have against the background of the 25

January Revolution, arent in conflict with the political struggle. On the contrary, as RosaLuxemburg pointed out in her classic analysis of the Russian Revolution of 1905, they are mutuallyreinforcing:
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But the movement on the whole does not proceed from the economic to the politicalstruggle, nor even the reverse. Every great political mass action, after it has attainedits political highest point, breaks up into a mass of economic strikes. And that appliesnot only to each of the great mass strikes, but also to the revolution as a whole. Withthe spreading, clarifying and involution of the political struggle, the economic strugglenot only does not recede, but extends, organises and becomes involved in equalmeasure. Between the two there is the most complete reciprocal action.

Every new onset and every fresh victory of the political struggle is transformed into apowerful impetus for the economic struggle, extending at the same time its externalpossibilities and intensifying the inner urge of the workers to better their position andtheir desire to struggle. After every foaming wave of political action a fructifyingdeposit remains behind from which a thousand stalks of economic struggle shoot forth.And conversely. The workers condition of ceaseless economic struggle with thecapitalists keeps their fighting energy alive in every political interval; it forms, so tospeak, the permanent fresh reservoir of the strength of the proletarian classes, fromwhich the political fight ever renews its strength, and at the same time leads theindefatigable economic sappers of the proletariat at all times, now here and now there,to isolated sharp conflicts, out of which public conflicts on a large scale unexpectedlyexplode.

In a word: the economic struggle is the transmitter from one political centre to another;the political struggle is the periodic fertilisation of the soil for the economic struggle.Cause and effect here continually change places; and thus the economic and thepolitical factors in the period of the mass strike, now widely removed, completelyseparated or even mutually exclusive, as the theoretical plan would have them, merelyform the two interlacing sides of the proletarian class struggle in Russia. And their unityis precisely the mass strike.63

Out of this dynamic interaction between economic and political struggles there is the potentialthat, as Trotsky put it, the democratic revolution grows over directly into the socialist revolutionand thereby becomes a permanent revolution.64 Of course, the Egyptian ruling class is unlikelymeekly to stand by in the face of this process. What methods can they use? The junta could

employ the forms of direct counter-revolutionary coercion that Mubarak unsuccessfully triedagainst the protesters in Tahrir Square at the beginning of February. The army has been quietlyarresting andtorturing activists, some of whom have been given five-year prison sentences by military courts.Attacks by gangs of thugs on women demonstrators on International Womens Day (8 March) andsimultaneously on members of the Coptic Christian minority in Moqattam, north Cairo, wereinterpreted by some activists as the SSIS hitting back.65

A combination of repression and divide and rule may just allow Gaddafi to hang onto power inLibya, but it is unlikely to work, certainly in the short-term, in Egypt, given the proliferation of massstruggles and popular organisation there. Committees to defend the revolution have been formedin different neighbourhoods and workplaces. The alternative would be to try to develop themediating political structureswhat Gramsci called the trench systems forming the very

complex structure of bourgeois democracythat have been at best marginal in Egypt since theFree Officers decisively crushed their opponents in 1954.66

Egyptian liberalismrepresented by Mohamed ElBaradei, Ayman Nour, and the historic Wafd Partyis almost certainly too weak a reed on which to lean. The Muslim Brotherhood is quite anothermatter. The object of much Islamophobic speculation in the West, the Brotherhood is in fact ahighly ambiguous and heterogeneous formation that has taken a number of different forms: themass anti-colonial movement of the 1940s and 1950s was crushed by Nasser, but the Brotherhoodhas revived since the 1980s as what Sameh Naguib describes as a populist political force,building up the strong base in the universities and professional syndicates and in poorneighbourhoods that allowed it to win nearly 20 percent of the seats in the relatively open


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parliamentary election of 2005.67 The Brotherhoods revival took place, incidentally, at the sametime as the regimes murderously successful campaign to crush the armed jihadist groups,elements of which went on to help form Al Qaida.

The Brotherhoods solidly bourgeois leadership has been divided between advocates of thealliances with more secular opposition forces that saw it cooperate with Nasserites andrevolutionary socialists in the Cairo conferences against occupation and imperialism and supportthe Kifaya democracy movement in the middle of the last decade and political quietists favouring

an accommodation with the regime. The latter were in the ascendant before the 25 JanuaryRevolution, but this did not prevent Brotherhood activists joining the rising. The essentiallybourgeois character of the Brotherhood meant that it has taken an ambivalent attitude towardsthe strike wave. But undoubtedly many workers have supported it in recent years as the mostpowerful opposition force.

The historical development of the workers movement in Egypt in the first half of the 20th centurywas characterised by a combination of workerismmilitant class organisation on economicissuesand populismsupport for multi-class nationalism in the struggle against Britishimperialism. This allowed the liberal nationalist Wafd to become, as Joel Beinin and ZacharyLockman put it, the hegemonic ideological and organisational force in the labour movement.68

Though the Wafds dominance was undermined by Communists and the Brotherhood after theSecond World War, the strength of anti-colonial nationalism (which in their own ways both thesetendencies supported), combined with a mixture of repression and economic reforms, allowedNasser to reduce the Egyptian working class to a subaltern position in his state capitalist regime.

The situation in Egypt is very different today. Nevertheless, the Brotherhoods organisationalresources and the very political and social ambiguity of its political messageIslam is theanswermean that it could play a decisive role in preventing the development of independentworking class politics in Egypt. The danger the Brotherhood poses is thus less the Islamistradicalisation obsessing the likes of Tony Blair, but its potential as a conservative force (thoughplaying such a role would cause divisions in its ranks). This underlines the foolishness ofrhapsodies about the centre-less character of the Arab revolutions. If the more radical elementsin the movement refuse to organise politically, other forces are very unlikely to be so self-denying.In fact, a plethora of new Egyptian parties are being formed in the wake of Mubaraks fall,fortunately including the Democratic Workers Party.69 The fate of particular initiatives such as thisone depends on many contingencies. But, although a very small and weak force, revolutionary

socialists have played an important part in the 25 January Revolution and the development of theEgyptian workers movement. If they help Egyptian workers develop a clear political voice of theirown, then dramatically greater revolutionary possibilities will open up throughout the Middle East.

Notes1: Benjamin, 1970, pp260, 263, 266. Thanks especially to Philip Marfleet as a source of analysisand information.

2: Benjamin, 1970, p259. For a critical discussion of the Theses, see Callinicos, 2004, chapter 5.

3: See, for example, Batatu, 1978, part five, Beinin and Lockman, 1987, chapters 13 and 14, andGordon, 1992. I have also benefited from reading a draft chapter by Anne Alexander on theinteraction between the mass movements and the Free Officers in Egypt and Iraq, and am gratefulfor her very helpful comments.

4: El-Mahdi and Marfleet, 2009.

5: Marx, 1971, p21.

6: Watkins, 2010, p20.

7: Callinicos, 2010, pp6-13.
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8: Dumnil and Lvy, 2011, p22.

9: Callinicos, 2010, p6.

10: http://bit.ly/worldbanktunisia/

11: http://bit.ly/worldbankegypt/

12: See, for example, Waterbury, 1983.

13: Bush, 2009.14: Alexander, 2011.

15: Al-Malky, 2010.

16: El-Naggar, 2009, p42.

17: http://arabworld.worldbank.org/content/awi/en/home/featured/youth_programs.html

18: Beinin, 2009, p77.

19: Fahim, Slackman, and Rohde, 2011.

20: Lewis, 2011.

21: Kornblihtt and Magro, 2011.

22: Schwartz, 2009, p110. See also pp164-171.

23: Chossudovsky, 2011.

24: Sadiki, 2011.

25:Trudell, 2011.

26: Sargent, 2011.

27: David McNally argues the Great Recession is provoking a Great Resistance, though some ofthe most important examples he cites-Bolivia 2000-5 and Oaxaca 2006-actually predate the onsetof the crisis-McNally, 2011.

28: Friedman, 2011c.

29: Friedman, 2011a.30: Chomsky, 1999, pp194-195.

31: Soldz, 2011.

32: Beaug, 2011.

33: Shamefully, Seif Gaddafi spoke about Libya: Past, Present, and Future in a Special RalphMiliband Event on 25 May 2010:www2.lse.ac.uk/publicEvents/events/2010/20100525t1830vLSE.aspx

34: Giddens, 2007.

35: Business Week, 2007.

36: Pilkington, 2011.

37: Pew Research Center, 2010.

38: Gates, 2011.

39: McGregor, 2011.

40: Gardner, 2011b.

41: Shavit, 2011.

42: Ali, 2011.

43:Trotsky, 1967, volume 1, p15.
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44: Hardt and Negri, 2011.

45: Gramsci, 1971, p196.

46:Temlali, 2011.

47: Beinin, 2009, p77.

48: Gramsci, 1978, p198.

49:Trotsky, 1972, p288. See, for further discussion of this distinction, Callinicos, 1991, pp50-66,and, of the related distinction between democratic and socialist revolutions, Rees, 1999.

50: Friedman, 2011b.

51: http://wikileaks.ch/cable/2008/09/08CAIRO2091.html

52:Talk at International Socialism seminar on Egypt, Tunisia, and Revolution in the Middle East,London, 22 February 2011; video at www.isj.org.uk/?id=716

53: Gardner, 2011a.

54: Allam and Khalaf, 2011,

55:Trotsky, 1967, volume 1, p16.

56: On the latter, see Harman, 1982, and Brou, 2006.

57: Hanna Batatus massive account of the origins, course and consequences of the IraqiRevolution is a historiographic masterpiece. See Batatu, 1978, pp985-986, for King Hussain of

Jordans account of the CIAs role in the February 1963 coup.

58: Kapuscinski, 1982, p114.

59: See Marshall, 1988, chapter 2, and Poya, 1987.

60: Warrick, 2011.

61: Clover and Khalaf, 2011.

62: Charbel, 2011.

63: Luxemburg, 1970, p185.

64:Trotsky, 1969, p278. Neil Davidson was therefore a little premature when he recently describedpermanent revolution in this journal as a historical concept, though he contradicted himself acouple of pages later, referring to the inherent instability created by the uneven and combineddevelopment of global capitalism as containing the possibilities of permanent revolution-Davidson, 2010, pp195, 197.

65: Ozman, 2011.

66: Gramsci, 1971, p235.

67: Naguib, 2009, p114.

68: Beinin and Lockman, 1987, p450; see generally part two. For a discussion of the dialectic ofworkerism and populism in the South African context, see Callinicos, 1988, especially pp191-194.

69: Shukrallah and El-Abbas, 2011.

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the return of the arab revolution

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